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took place across the street most afternoons, when he felt free and young and extraordinarily competent: dribble downcourt, push off from the knees, send the orange ball sailing with a motion of his wrist that had become second nature in Catholic school gyms, watch it sink with only that slight lisp of a sound that had given the shot the name “swish.” Basketball made him feel simultaneously like a man and a boy. Everyone nodded to Buddy Phelan when he left for the night, climbing into his Olds 98, but no one ever asked him to join them for a beer, except Tommy, when he had nothing better to do. He felt sorry for the guy.
    When he turned from the window, Gino was gone and his brother Mark was just coming up the stairs. Mark was flushed bright pink in the heat, but his tie was still tied tight, while Tommy’s was at half-mast. They looked like brothers, both mostly beige: beige hair, faded from the tow they’d had as boys, beige freckles, darker beige eyes. But where Tommy was long and rangy, Mark was solid and short. It was only after Mark had married that he had been able to convince his family to stop calling him “Squirt,” although John Scanlan, who was an even six feet tall, still felt compelled to make comments about his son’s height from time to time.
    “We’re going to have to paint the trucks next week,” Tommy said.
    “I don’t know why you fight him on that,” Mark said. “You know who wins.”
    The two stood silent, sweating. Tommy took a great deal of satisfaction out of the fact that he didn’t work directly for his father, and Mark resented him for it, thinking that depending on John Scanlan’s largesse once removed was worse than simply facing facts and going to work for Scanlan & Co. “We’re all in the family business,” their sister Margaret always said with a grin. Mark could not understand how this could apply to obstetrics or a religious vocation, but Margaret said that was simply because he was always too literal.
    In fact Tommy would have preferred not to work for any Scanlan enterprise. When he and Connie had first married they had talked of moving to California, of living where it was always warm and no one had ever heard of John Scanlan, where they didn’t care if you were Italian as long as you weren’t Mexican. But their own fecundity had laid waste to that dream. During the first five years of their marriage, when they had heard not a word from Tommy’s parents, they had learned how difficult it was to pay the bills on a working man’s salary. Then John Scanlan had taken an interest in Maggie, and Tommy had been hired, after a perfunctory interview, as a vice president at First Concrete. His wife had barely spoken to him for nearly two months after he took the job. The words she had used to break the silence were “I’m pregnant again.”
    There were only two reasons why Tommy preferred being an executive to being one of the men carrying and shoveling cement. The first was that he needed the money. He and Connie had practiced rhythm since Maggie was born, and they had three sons to show for it, and a suspicion of another on the way. Saddle shoes alone ran him two hundred dollars a year. The other thing he loved about his job was his office. As offices went, it was on the small side, with a window that looked over the parking lot to the basketball court and playground across the street, and the red-brick public school building beyond that. When two trains passed going in opposite directions on the elevated line, his office shivered like a child with a high fever. Sometimes in the summer the Sanitation Department would not be quick enough about picking up the garbage, and the wholesale fruit market across the road would give off an overripe sweet smell. But Tommy had a gray desk, a gray file cabinet, a gray table that held an adding machine and stood beneath a wall displaying a full-color map of the city of New York, with pins in it for job locations, which made Tommy feel